Soul Longing Quotes & Sayings

She looked out across the water and allowed the feeling of longing to wash over her, spill into the crevices of her soul, and fill her completely. — Elizabeth Fama

Recall the gesture of abasement, warlock. You make it in recognition of your own humility. A god's powers are immeasurable and before them you are nothing. Therefore you would worship your god and surrender your life into its hands. But it doesn't want your life, and knows not what to do with your longing, helpless soul. In ritual and symbol you have lost yourselves. Could the god make you understand, it would make you understand this simple truth: the only thing worthy of worship is humility itself. — Steven Erikson

When I am longing for love, every rose is the expression of my soul. — Debasish Mridha

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water (Psalm 63:1). We may imagine we want a thousand different things, but God is the one we really long for. His presence brings satisfaction; his absence brings thirst and longing. — Randy Alcorn

Gradually, the anxiety gives way to contemplation, and I start to listen to my soul. It has been longing to speak to me, but I'm always too busy. — Paulo Coelho

The longing of my soul is to know and obey the Supreme-being,God. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There was our love - there was our hope that we'd walk out of this with a future. There was our acceptance of each other - the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. There was so much pent-up longing. So much emotion that it packed a sucker punch straight to my soul and his, and I knew it, because I could feel his heart rate picking up. Mine matched his - made for his. All of that was in a simple kiss and it was too much, not enough, and just perfect. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen. — John O'Donohue

The feeling, "this can't be it", is a very powerful form of prayer. It's the agony of the separated self longing for reunion with wholeness. It's the call of your soul urging you to return to your own path and purpose. It's the force of evolution driving you home. Do not try to deny or override your divine discontent. Heed its call. Knowing "this can't be it" implies that somewhere inside you, you DO know what IS it. — Alan Cohen

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. — Robert Collyer

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. — Fernando Pessoa

He lay on top of me, buried deep, and fell asleep.
He slept all night like that, and I did not move him, did not want to. I gasped breath in and out and closed my eyes and thought that I would never forget this feeling, of him on me and in me, of him consuming my soul and letting me go.
He was too callous, too far gone to realize that I'd never be free of him, and all he'd really done was set me adrift.
I never left that bed.
That feeling of helpless abandonment and unendurable longing stayed inside of me, for hours, for minutes, for weeks.
For years.
I went through my life, through tragedy and pain, through hardship and life, and my heart, my very sould, stayed in that bed.
I felt broken after that last encounter.
Pieces of me had been shattered on that bed, important, essential pieces, and they would not, could not, ever find their way back together.
But I kept going. Life is cruel like that. — R.K. Lilley

Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand - an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature's own exceeding peace, which "passes understanding". That which we seek with passionate longing, here and there, upward and outward; we find at last within ourselves. — Richard Maurice Bucke

I sense that the thing I am seeking is higher than love and higher than the joy of life and higher than science and glory and higher even than starts. Don't keep my wings tied in Your embrace.
You are only a shadow and only a smile in the great journey of my soul. Your eyes are the two clear springs where my thoughts came to drink and rest for a moment. And between Your breasts hides the soft pillow where I slept for a moment in order to waken again. Don't hold me bound. The enigma is not hidden in Your Lions nor in Your enormous eyes. And Your arms are small and weak and do not embrace my entire soul. There is a magnet above the stars that pulls me. And my entire body shudders, magnetized by the Great Nostalgia and the Great Longing. Someone is pulling at me from the stars. Do not hold me bound. The thing I am seeking is higher than love and higher than the joy of life. — Nikos Kazantzakis

The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152
— Brennan Manning

Rhys absorbed that with chagrin. "No one has ever accused me of being a romantic," he said ruefully.
"If you were, how would you propose?"
He thought for a moment. "I would begin by teaching you a Welsh word. Hiraeth There's no equivalent in English."
"Hiraeth," she repeated, trying to pronounce it with a tapped R, as he had.
"Aye. It's a longing for something that was lost, or never existed. You feel it for a person or a place, or a time in your life ... it's a sadness of the soul. Hiraeth calls to a Welshman even when he's closest to happiness, reminding him that he's incomplete."
Her brow knit with concern. "Do you feel that way?"
"Since the day I was born." He looked down into her small, lovely face. "But not when I'm with you. That's why I want to marry you. — Lisa Kleypas

The phrase "Old Soul" is the closest many can come to describing those who feel like they have seen and done it all before, who can see through the lies and illusions of existence, and who experience a tired longing to "return home. — Aletheia Luna

My mind is an instrument of peace
I am the peace
My heart sing the song of peace
My mind dances with peace
I laugh with peace
My soul is longing for peace
My spirit is the source of peace. — Debasish Mridha

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man. — John Eldredge

Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul. — Neel Mukherjee

A girl who would surrender every inhibition to her at night, yet still refused to become a dependant. Andria was more than erotic satisfaction, she filled the soul's longing. — Anonymous

I AM RESTLESS
AM restless. I am athirst for far-away things.
My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.
O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.
I am eager and wakeful, I am a stranger in a strange land.
Thy breath comes to me whispering an impossible hope.
Thy tongue is known to my heart as its very own.
O Far-to-seek, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I know not the way, that I have not the winged horse.
I am listless, I am a wanderer in my heart.
In the sunny haze of the languid hours, what vast vision of thine takes shape in the blue of the sky!
O Farthest end, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that the gates are shut everywhere in the house where I dwell alone! — Rabindranath Tagore

In my heart, a live fire
Like the morning sun
Burning my mind, to purify the soul
That is my love.

In my dream a burning desire
Like the lights from a diamond
Make my life ever precious
That is my love.

my mind an ever longing
As the moon longing for night
Make the night dreams of desire
That is my love. — Debasish Mridha

Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits. — Anatoli Boukreev

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death. — Saul Bellow

Grief is not an event, my dear, but a passage, a pilgrimage along a path that allows us to reflect upon the past from points of remembrance held in the soul. At times the way is filled with stones underfoot and we feel pained by our memories, yet on other days the shadows reflect our longing and those happinesses shared. — Jacqueline Winspear

Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an apalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, - a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium. Edna vaguely wondered what she meant by "life's delirium." It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression. — Kate Chopin

Though he was tired of loneliness - tired down to the depths of his heart - that was really not was troubled him most. What tortured him was the hunger in his soul. A longing. A quiet voice that could not be stilled. Not a threatening voice - or a nagging one. But a persistent calling. Like a parent who calls an errant child back to dinner. Or a father who calls for a son to join him down at the pier for a fishing trip; like a voice echoing off the lake. It was a strangely familiar voice that was calling. A little like the memory of a reunion, long forgotten. Why did he resist it, even fear it? Why would he not respond to a call that came to him in a way that sounded, and felt, so much like family? — Craig Parshall

I guess part of me hoped that you'd come to me because you trusted me to help. And because maybe you missed me, just a little."
Beka took a deep breath. "Just a little? Hell, Marcus, it felt like I was missing half my soul."...
His hazel eyes stared into hers, as if he could read her mind, or maybe her heart, which stuttered and skipped as if it only half remembered how to beat.
Then he said in a low, fervent voice, "I think I found it for you." He pulled her into his arms, wrapping her in strength and warmth and longing, tugging her in close until his lips met hers. — Deborah Blake

Thou I cannot so freely say, My heart is with thee, my soul longeth after thee ; yet can I say, I long for such a longing heart (648). — Richard Baxter

In the darkness with no ember, cold coals bear no flaming tinder. All the shadows, man resemble. In the darkness, wise men tremble. Prodigious foes made thee for pointless sake of prosaic power. Visited upon thyself no vestige of vision by late nights hour. In the stillness of normal eve, in longing for the night's reprieve. In air and earth arise a faint and subtle shift, tis follies gift. With tremulous breath, whisper faintly from thy spirits tower. 'Woe to me!', thy soul says. Cometh nigh, The Rez. — Kel Kade

Sanary says that you have to travel south by water to find answers to your dreams. He says too that you find yourself again there, but only if you get lost on the way - completely lost. Through love. Through longing. Through fear. Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy. — Nina George

My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea, and the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing. If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us. — John O'Donohue

To her, and to father! Whew! A coincidence! Why was I calling you, wishing for you, why was I longing and thirsting for you with every curve of my soul and even with my ribs? Because I wanted to send you precisely to father, and then to her as well, to Katerina Ivanovna, to have done with her and with father. To send an angel. I could have sent anybody, but I need to send an angel. And here you are going to her and father yourself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Down deep in every soul has a hidden longing, impulse, and
ambition to do something fine and enduring ... If you are willing,
great things are possible to you. — Grenville Kleiser

This is not written for the young or the light of heart, not for the tranquil species of men whose souls are content with the simple pleasures of family, church, or profession. Rather, I write to those beings like myself whose existence is compounded by a lurid intermingling of the dark and the
light; who can judge rationally and think with reason, yet who feel too keenly and churn with too great a passion; who have an incessant longing for happiness and yet are
shadowed by a deep and persistent melancholy - those who grasp gratification where they may, but find no lasting comfort for the soul. — B.E. Scully

It is not possible to achieve by vigilance in anger and revenge what the soul is longing for. The soul longs for peace. — James A. Forbes

The very first evidence of awakening grace is dissatisfaction with one's self and self-effort and a longing for deliverance from chains of sin that have bound the soul. To own frankly that I am lost and guilty is the prelude to life and peace. It is not a question of a certain depth of grief and sorrow, but simply the recognition and acknowledgment of need that lead one to turn to Christ for refuge. None can perish who put their trust in Him. His grace superabounds above all our sin, and His expiatory work on the cross is so infinitely precious to God that it fully meets all our uncleanness and guilt. — H. A Ironside

The innate longing within every soul is to awaken from the spirit's slumber and then to journey home. — Patsie Smith

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate. — George Eliot

I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,' I said. 'It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong. You can only have the desperate confusion and longing and the chasing of phantom goodness in its human form. I knew the real answer to my quest before I ever reached Paris. I knew it when I first took a human life to feed my craving. It was my death. And yet I would not accept it, could not accept it, because like all creatures I don't wish to die! And so I sought for other vampires, for God, for the devil, for a hundred things under a hundred names. And it was all the same, all evil. And all wrong. Because no one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be ture, that I was damned in my own mind and soul. — Anne Rice

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a
local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous
thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over
the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a
revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body
heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the
unseen something that haunts the day - men in fedoras and sailors on
shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game. — Don DeLillo

Your poor heart, in which God put appreciation for everlastingness, will not take electronic gadgets in lieu of eternal life. Something inside of you is too big for that, too terrible, too wonderful. God has set everlastingness in your heart. All the things of this world are here for but a moment and then are gone. None can satisfy the longing for that eternal ragging in the soul of every man. — A.W. Tozer

None but God can satisfy the longings of an immortal soul; that as the heart was made for Him, so He only can fill it. — Richard Chenevix Trench

Every touch of you on my skin has burnt and etched your name on my soul. Whenever I close my eyes and try to feel myself, all I can hear is constant echoes of your name in my head, and all I can feel is the constant longing for the darkness. — Akshay Vasu

The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams. — Alain De Botton

It is poetic and lyrical; words that spill forth like cool waters into the dusty dry rock bed of the Soul desiring love. It has been said that I've lived in the desert all my life and do not know what it means to be wet. — Sophia Rose

Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God. — Phillips Brooks

Stefan's love bathed her, shone through her, lighting every dark place in her soul like the sun. She trembled with pleasure, with love, and with longing. — L.J.Smith

What people are craving isn't perfection. People aren't longing to be impressed; they're longing to feel like they're home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they'll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd. — Shauna Niequist

So speak that I may hear, Lord, my heart is listening; open it that it may hear Thee say to my soul I am Thy salvation. Hearing that word, let me come in haste to lay hold upon Thee. Hide not Thy face from me.19 Let me see Thy face even if I die,20 lest I die with longing to see it. — Augustine Of Hippo

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation. — Theodor W. Adorno

She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her. — Kate Chopin

1:207-208
STEADINESS

Soul guides and prophets have an innate innocence, but they are subject to the same consequences as everyone. If a donkey veers off-course, he will be hit with a stick. If you do wrong, you will be punished. Abu Bakr said that steadiness is the central virtue. From the mind's stability comes right action which in turn balances the intelligence.

They asked me why prophets were given hardship. I said it helps to have clear indications. And I added silently to myself, Be more humble like someone held captive. Bow to the one who can free you.

Well beyond the reach of its fragrance,
I try to remember and say this longing. — Bahauddin

Today is such a lovely day,
my heart is dancing with joy.
My mind is flowing with time
and my soul is longing for your soul. — Debasish Mridha

We are the mirror, as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste of eternity this minute.
We are pain and what cures pain.
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
Soul of the world, no life, nor world remain,
no beautiful women and men longing.
Only this ancient love circling the holy black stone of nothing.
Where the lover is the loved, the horizon and everything within it. — Rumi

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light. — Barbara Kingsolver

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. — Oscar Wilde

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love. — Anthony Minghella

Love is life.
The soul is ever longing for love. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There was so much feeling in the world. So much sadness. So much longing. So much joy. Everything had a soul. The petals of flowers. The mice of the field. The clouds and rain and the bare limbs of trees. All — Justin Cronin

The heart of the matter: You should never belong fully to something that is outside yourself. It is very important to find a balance in your belonging. You should never belong totally to any cause or system. People frequently need to belong to an external system because they are afraid to belong to their own lives. If your soul is awakened, then you realize that this is the house of your real belonging. Your longing is safe there. — John O'Donohue

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted. — Michel Onfray

We all have a relentless yearning to attach and connect, to love and be loved. This relationship hunger is the fiercest longing of the human soul. — Dave Earley

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Out would come another star, winking at me over the white shoulder of the Rothorn. Round me stood the mountains, exquisite examples of peace - A world above man's head, to let him see How boundless might his soul's horizons be - and here was I, minding because guests went into their bedrooms and told each other I had five children. Well, so I had. Nothing could possibly be more true. How vast, yet of what clear transparency - and minding because they said I was forty, which I certainly would be some day, if I went on living at the rate I was doing. How it were good to abide there and be free - The fact was, I reflected, my eyes on the glittering slopes of the Weisshorn, we were all too close together, and my guests, being of one family, only made this closeness worse. The remedy - it burst upon me suddenly in a flash, - was not to waste my serenity vainly longing for the guests I had to go, but to invite yet more of them. Unrelated ones. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches? — Helene Cixous

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life's burning question has been inscribed in one's soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim's soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine. — Michael Meade

Within ourselves, there are voices that provide us with all the answers that we need to heal our deepest wounds, to transcend our limitations, to overcome our obstacles or challenges, and to see where our soul is longing to go. — Debbie Ford

He gazed into eyes the color of a summer morning sky and sighed. It felt as if his soul had just come home. — Grace Willows

But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine. — David Levithan

Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives. — John O'Donohue

Vronsky meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love - he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires - boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose. — Leo Tolstoy

It must be so,-Plato, thou reasonest well! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 'T is the divinity that stirs within us; 'T is Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought! — Joseph Addison

Love is never satisfied with half-measures. It won't take parts of you. It will own all of you, every single, longing piece. "Love will make you its slave," I stated venomously. "It will ruin you. Grind you under its heel until you don't recognize what's left. "Love will take your soul. — R.K. Lilley

The desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom. Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory of sensations. To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application on a large scale. And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was reasonable. — Joseph Conrad

The worst of it is, that we can believe God about everything except the present pressing trial. This is folly. Come, my soul, shake off such sinfulness, and trust thy God with the load, the labour, the longing of this present. This done, all is done. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust. — Thea Euryphaessa

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. — Mahatma Gandhi

But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul's body. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? — Fernando Pessoa

There is a hopeless longing for nostalgia that pervades the human soul, a return to the warm glow of remembrance or some imagined past. — Deborah L. Norris

The Happy one Is to have fine senses and a fine taste.. To be accustomed to the select and intellectually best..to be blessed with a strong bold and daring soul..to go through life with a quiet eye and a firm step, ever ready for the worst as for the festival, and full of longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, men and Gods — Fredrich Nietzsche

You are here to remind me of someone I long for, and what is it you long for yourself? We must have been together in an earlier life, you and I. — Murasaki Shikibu

Rain,
Aren't you my soul's joyful tears
only longing for the sky to be happy? — Munia Khan

I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I'm in a state of utter confusion, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I'm longing for something ... — Anne Frank

Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment. — John O'Donohue

People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land. The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find that sense comforting. I don't believe any of it. I've never seen a soul depart from a body. I've never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I've never been rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead. — Barry Eisler

How do I describe the feeling that envelopes my being when he is near? It is like a cocoon of warmth and peace, but beneath that there is a deep longing, a hunger that one kiss would not be able to satisfy, one kiss would only make the hunger greater. But oh, how I long for that kiss, a kiss that might never come.
Being close to him does things to me, makes me feel things I never knew existed, makes me want things I have never wanted before. I have never desired to know a man's body before I met Ariston. I wonder if he knows that I desire him in such a way, that I not only want to know his body, but that I want him to know mine. There is a part of me that would not care if he loves me or not if I could just have one beautiful, passionate night with him, while the rest of me knows that one night would never be enough. — Jasmine Dubroff

I am no woman. I am a neuter.
I am a child, a page-boy, and a bold decision,
I am a laughing glimpse of a burning sun
I am a net for all voracious fish,
I am a toast to every woman's honor,
I am a step toward chance and disaster,
I am a leap in freedom and the self
I am the blood's whisper in a man's ear,
I am the soul's shiver, the flesh's longing and denial,
I am an entry sign to new paradises
I am a flame, seeking and jolly,
I am a water, deep, but daring up to the knees,
I am fire and water, in sincere context, on free term — Edith Sodergran

Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pull
back the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,
human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatness
of this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewn
across the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist - my
soul purpose. — Brian Bowers

Out of the rhythm and sound of the sea that beat through the orchestra, something moved
pressing toward death with quiet insistent joy
the thread through the maze
the soul behind the toil and the crime and longing. — Jeanette Lee

The moments of nature's universal, triumphant silence had come, those minutes when the creative mind works harder, poetic thoughts seethe more ardently, the heart's passion blazes more brightly and its longing aches more painfully, the grain of criminal thought ripens in a cruel soul more imperturbably and powerfully. — Ivan Goncharov

In the distance I hear a song - a simple song - a song of despair - a song of longing and a song of sorrow.
I have forgotten the words and the rhythm, but I sing.
Yes, I sing. — Pietros Maneos

And as she looked at the pool she saw the waters gather up into a column, rushing up foaming and standing there before her startled eyes, and turn into the form of a man.
Not a man, a god. So perfectly formed, so handsome, with such wisdom and desire in his eyes and such quiet joy on his lips. He was breathtakingly beautiful and Anne felt herself grow weak with some unnamable longing. His eyes met hers and caught her soul tight, and she could not look away as he read every thought in her mind.
"Come," he said to her in a voice like liquid silver, "I know your mind, and it is one with mine."
Anne could not speak, but she did not need to. Her eyebrows raised in question.
He laughed, "Why to love, of course. — Elliot Mabeuse

And
Her soul! Her soul is consumed by this longing. — Sappho

Longing, breathing, and panting after deliverance is a grace in itself, that has a mighty power to conform the soul into the likeness of the thing longed after ... unless you long for deliverance you shall not have it. — John Owen

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known. — Justin Cronin

It seemed to her as if her body were altogether too heavy for her; she had the feeling so well known to opium- smokers, which they call "clou'e 'a terre." It is as if the body clung desperately to the earth, by its own weight, and yet in the same way as a tired child nestles to its mother's breast. In this sensation there is a perfect lassitude mingled with a perfect longing. It may be that it is the counterpart of the freedom of the soul of which it is the herald and companion. — Aleister Crowley